Data Warehouse Solutions in Azure

Date Warehousing Solutions at a Glance

With today’s big data requirements where data could be structured, unstructured, batch, stream and come in many other forms and size, traditional data warehouse is not going to cut it.

Typically, there are 4 types of data stage:

Ingest

Store

Processing

Consuming

Different technology is required at different stage. This also depends heavily on size and form of data and the 4 Vs: Volume, Variety, Velocity, Veracity.

Consideration for the solutions sometime also depends on:

Ease of management

Team skill sets

Language

Cost

Specification / requirements

Integration with existing / others system.

Azure Services

Azure offers many services for data warehouse solutions. Traditionally, data warehouse has been ETL process + relational database storage like SQL Data Warehouse. Today, that may not always be the case.

Some of Azure services for data warehousing:

Azure HDInsight
Azure offers various cluster types that comes with HDInsight, fully managed by Microsoft, but still require management from users. Also supports Data Lake Storage. More about HDInsight. HDInsight sits on “Processing” data stage.

Azure Databricks
Its support for machine learning, AI, analytics and stream / graph processing makes it a go-to solution for data processing. It’s also fully integrated with Power BI and other source / destination tools. Notebooks in Databricks allows collaboration between data engineers, data scientist and business users. Compare to HDInsight.

Azure Data Factory
The “Ingest” part of data stage. Its function is to bring data in and move them around different system. Azure Data Factory supports different pipelines across Azure services to connect the data and even on-premise data. Azure Data Factory can be used to control the flow of data.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Typically the end destination of data and to be consumed by business users. SQL DW is platform as a service, require less management from users and great for team who already familiar with TSQL and SSMS (SQL Management Studio). You can also scale it dynamically, pause / resume the compute. SQL DW uses internal storage to store data and include the compute component. SQL Data Warehouse sits on “Consuming” stage.

Database services (RDBMS, Cosmos, etc)
SQL database, or other relational database system, Cosmos are part of the storage solutions offered in Azure Services. This is typically more expensive than Azure Storage, but also offer other features. Database services are part of “Storage” stage.

Azure Data Lake Storage
Build on top of Azure Storage, ADLS offers unlimited storage and file system based on HDFS, allowing optimization for analytics purpose, like Hadoop or HDInsight. ADLS is part of “Storage” stage.

Azure Data Lake Analytics
ADLA is a high-level abstraction of HDInsight. Users will not need to worry about scaling and management of the clusters at all, it’s an instant scale per job. However, this also comes with some limitations. ADLA support USQL, a SQL-like language that allows custom user defined function in C#. The tooling is also what developers are already familiar with, Visual Studio.

Azure Storage

Azure Analysis Services

Power BI

Which one to use?

There’s no right or wrong answer. The right solution depends on many others things, technical and non-technical as well as the considerations mentioned above.

Simon Lidberg and Benjamin Wright Jones have a really good presentation around this topic. See the link at reference for their full talk. But, basically, the flowchart to make decision looks like this: